Sustainability happens in the supply chain, but that looks different in every country, depending on its cultural, ecological and geopolitical context. This article is part of our Made in India series, where we unpack the nuanced challenges and opportunities in Indian fashion supply chains. Read more here.
There was once a strain of cotton native to India called phuti karpas, which yielded fibres so delicate that fabrics woven from it were poetically termed ‘baft-hawa’, translating to “woven air”. It was used to produce Dhaka muslin, considered one of India’s finest fabrics. Today, phuti karpas is extinct.
Indigenous cotton varieties once thrived in India, supporting a vast artisanal economy. Farmers, ginners, spinners and artisans existed in an interdependent chain, known as a fibreshed system. Each stage of the process — from cultivation to weaving — was closely tied to local knowledge, craftsmanship and environmental conditions. This decentralised structure not only provided livelihoods, but also ensured that textile production remained rooted in regional ecologies, creating fabrics uniquely adapted to their climates and cultures.
But centuries of colonial extraction and ecological displacement all but stamped out this economy, leaving India with a cotton industry that is now dominated by industrial-scale farming, monocultures and genetically modified crops. While this shift enabled India to become one of the world’s largest cotton producers, it came at a cost: declining soil health, increased pesticide reliance and a system that prioritises yield over resilience.
The fashion industry’s sustainability ambitions — from regenerative agriculture to circularity — are directly tied to how raw materials are grown and sourced. Indigenous cotton varieties, with their natural resistance to pests and adaptability to local climates, offer an alternative to the water and chemical-intensive cultivation of bt cotton, the genetically modified strain that was introduced to India in 2002, and now dominates the country’s cotton fields.
Reviving India’s native cotton isn’t just about cultural preservation — it’s about creating a more resilient, ethical and climate-conscious supply chain. As brands push for traceability and regenerative fibre sourcing, these efforts to restore indigenous crops could play a pivotal role in shaping the future of sustainable fashion.
In recent years, various grassroots initiatives have sought to revive India’s indigenous varieties. Here, we explore the challenges and opportunities faced by three of them as they attempt to scale.
Restoring climate resilient native varieties in Kutch, Gujarat
In 2001, a devastating earthquake struck the district of Kutch, Gujarat, displacing millions and accelerating industrialisation. As large-scale industries moved in the earthquake’s wake, traditional farming and weaving systems were pushed to the margins.
Four years later, in 2005, Khamir was founded as an NGO to preserve and protect the region’s rich crafts and industries. At first, the organisation focused on connecting the region’s handloom weavers with market demands by organising exhibitions in New Delhi’s urban centres. However, in 2008, Khamir realised an opportunity to create its own local value chain by reviving a regional indigenous cotton variety that had dwindled: kala cotton.
Kala cotton is a drought-resistant native variety that had once flourished in the region. Known for its short-staple fibre, kala cotton is well adapted to arid and semi-arid conditions, thriving with minimal water and chemical inputs, while supporting traditional pastoral and farming communities.
Khamir’s first step was to partner with local institutions like Satvik, which worked to promote organic farming, and Setu, which organised the farmers of East Kutch into producer groups, while Khamir internally mapped weavers who still retained the skill of working with the native cotton — known for requiring advanced weaving skills. Despite initial scepticism from farmers accustomed to government subsidies for bt cotton, Khamir pursued small-scale reintroductions of kala cotton farming.
After two and a half years of refinement, Khamir officially launched its kala cotton initiative in New Delhi, positioning the material not just as a product range but as a comprehensive story of heritage and sustainability. It developed decentralised supply chains, directly linking smallholder farmers with spinners and weavers. By 2018, the model had begun to scale, with increasing adoption among artisanal-focused brands like Urvashi Kaur and 11.11.
A defining feature of Khamir’s initiative has been its open-source approach, encouraging direct brand-weaver relationships instead of monopolising the market. “We decided to keep the kala cotton initiative open for local weavers to participate,” says Khamir director Ghatit Laheru. “They keenly watched us doing experimentation and joined us when they started seeing the market impact. The initiative helped weavers to operate at a scale. It also helped them to develop natural yarn dyeing skills.”
One such weaver is Shamji Vankar Vishram Valji, one of four brothers who work as a collective. Their father, master weaver Vishram Valji, was a celebrated artisan. An early adopter of kala cotton, Shamji has put together 60 families of weavers and dyers who collaboratively create fabrics of cotton and wool that are then transformed into carpets, stoles, scarves and more. Over the last 20 years, Shamji has transformed the venture into a prosperous business with clients in India and abroad, with his goals of chronicling his family craft and the Bhujodi village having earned him the Unesco Seal of Excellence.
“If Khamir had not discovered kala cotton in 2008 and started working with it, it may have been another struggling NGO across the country,” says Juhi Pandey, who worked at Khamir from 2016 to 2018. “The ripple effect that has happened because of it, of reviving the weaving community, bringing back the young weavers who had moved out of Kutch to come back, to take it over and make it such a robust industry, is amazing."
Laheru says the priority now is to replicate this model across India — particularly in regions facing farmer distress. One such region is Punjab, where monoculture farming and an ongoing agrarian crisis make such interventions urgent.
The seed-to-sew revival in Punjab’s Malwa region
Punjab, often referred to as India’s breadbasket, has an agrarian identity deeply tied to its historical geography. Its name — Panj-ab, meaning “land of five rivers” — reflects a landscape shaped by water-fed abundance and centuries of agricultural traditions.
Once home to diverse cropping systems, Punjab became the epicentre of the Green Revolution in the 1960s, a state-led initiative aimed at increasing agricultural productivity through high-yield hybrid crops, chemical fertilisers and mechanised farming techniques. While initially celebrated for boosting wheat and rice production, this shift came at a significant ecological and social cost. Traditional polyculture farming, which sustained diverse food crops and fibre varieties, was replaced by monoculture fields dedicated to cash crops that required heavy irrigation and chemical inputs. The high costs associated with these inputs, coupled with fluctuating crop prices, pushed many farmers into debt — leading to a rise in suicides in the region.
As Punjab’s agrarian crisis deepened, non-profit Kheti Virasat Mission (KVM) was founded in 2005 to revive organic farming by advocating for crop diversification and traditional agricultural practices, enhancing farmers’ resilience to market fluctuations and environmental stresses. While the legacy of the Green Revolution continues to shape Punjab’s farming practices, KVM is now working to reclaim indigenous agricultural knowledge by reviving the cultivation of Punjab’s native cotton variety, desi kapaa (or gossypium arboreum).
In 2018, KVM associate director Rupsi Garg observed the need for farmers to diversify their crops, as she realised there was an opportunity to introduce cotton into the mix. An avid spinner herself, and inspired by Gandhian philosophies of rural self-sufficiency, she launched Trinjan, an initiative designed to reconnect farmers with traditional cotton cultivation and weaving.
Historically, craft in Punjab was never a solitary act, nor was it a commercial industry. Instead, it was part of a community practice, where women spun and wove essentials for a bride’s future home, from wearable textiles to tapestries and bedsheets. Women gathered in ‘trinjan’ — a tradition of spinning, singing and weaving together that has informed a deep part of Punjab’s folk and dance culture. For Garg, the revival of the cotton value chain is tied to a revival of cultural heritage. “We are working on technical aspects, social aspects and cultural aspects,” she says.
Between 2018 and 2019, Garg focused on procuring native seeds — a process that took nearly three years in order to get a substantial amount of both “quantity and quality”. Garg tapped research institutes, which would often give seeds after the sowing period was over. She identified farmers still growing indigenous cotton in small quantities and discovered that they often mixed varieties, requiring a time-intensive separation process to maintain an organic and native seed stock.
In 2020, with Covid in the background, the project expanded to 10 farmers — slowly scaling the volume of cotton production. Next, Garg sought the older women in surrounding villages who still had access to their spinning wheels, and those who had weaving looms.
The next three years were spent rebuilding this lost network, transferring cotton from farmers to female artisans, who painstakingly revived the labour-intensive process of ginning, carding and spinning. In this process, she noted that the entire ecosystem of cotton cultivation relied on a network of female spinners and weavers — and while this gave an important channel of work on gender lines, the older age of the network meant that the practice hung in the balance.
In 2023, Garg decided to establish a weaving school. She then spent 2024 with a pilot programme training 25 women, alongside expanding her cotton network to 25 farmers. The weaving school framework allowed her to employ the most experienced spinners and weavers in her network to facilitate the training, being able to revive the communal setting of craft and exchange — echoing the trinjan that initially inspired the initiative.
Now, the tension is twofold: unlike wheat and rice, which have government-mandated market support, there is no formal system to facilitate the sale of organic cotton. Without this infrastructure, organic fibre farming remains financially precarious. And while she builds the capacity and know-how of artisans via the weaving school, she sits on a growing amount of fabric stock.
Trinjan highlights the difficult tensions of transition — while farmers slowly transition towards organic fibres, artisans strengthen their craft and the market catches up.
Women-led models in Bhikamkor, Rajasthan
South of Punjab, in the state of Rajasthan, an initiative presents a different set of challenges: marketplace access is secured, but the need to build seed-level infrastructure remains.
Madhu Vaishnav is committed to supporting female farmers, addressing a historic disparity in which women constitute almost 75 per cent of full-time rural agricultural workers yet rarely generate direct income due to cultural norms and inheritance laws that favour male heirs.
In 2015, recognising the pressing need for economic opportunities among women in her village, Vaishnav founded non-profit social enterprise Saheli Women in Bhikamkor, Rajasthan. Vaishnav observed that, although many women in the village owned sewing machines as part of their marriage dowries, they lacked opportunities to use these skills for financial gain.
Recognising this untapped potential, Saheli Women seeks to empower these women through skills development, now employing over 100 artisans across two centres and collaborating with more than 60 fashion brands globally. The organisation provides fair wages, health insurance and a safe working environment, empowering women to become primary earners and challenge traditional gender roles.
“The land owner is always the man, because women technically come from another family and nothing belongs to her,” Vaishnav explains. “We want to change this cultural practice, and we want to do it through cotton farming. We want to recognise women as landlords. We want to give them direct income.”
While Saheli Women initially focused on garment production for brand partners, Vaishnav sees an opportunity to expand into seed-to-sew production, deepening the community’s engagement with sustainability. She has spent the past two years training the workforce on how to spin and weave the yarn she had previously procured from mills in South India.
Now, Vaishnav is looking to launch a localised system for organic kala cotton cultivation, with her village in Rajasthan mirroring the arid conditions of Kutch. This year, she’s identified five female farmers in her locality who will begin growing kala cotton — with the goal of producing her first cotton crop by the end of the year.
Vaishnav’s intention sits not only in reviving a local kala cotton value chain — as seen with projects like Khamir — but in challenging the gender dynamics of the village. “We know from our own experience that once women started earning stable income through Saheli Women, the whole power shift happened in the home. During Covid, when our ladies were only earning a hand of the home, they immediately got a lot of respect, and they’re also making equal decisions in the family as well as in the village. So if she will prove that even by doing this, we can protect our land, we can have a crop, we can earn better income.”
Vaishnav stands at the beginning of a new journey, working to bring the seed-to-sew model to life. She says industry support is essential for this transition — leading to a new model in which brands are not just buyers, but co-investors in indigenous crop systems.
Reviving crops, restoring communities
The revival of indigenous crops is more than an agricultural shift — it is a movement to restore ecological knowledge, livelihoods and social systems that have long been destabilised. Across India, case studies highlight that successful revival efforts are built on local intelligence, grassroots collaboration, as well as a commitment to deep observation and long-term investment.
At a time when India stands at the crossroads of ecological restoration and industrial agriculture, these initiatives challenge mainstream sustainability narratives — such as the oversimplified notion of cotton as a universally ‘thirsty’ crop. And instead push the fashion industry to engage with landscapes in transition, where regenerative practices depend on contextual understanding rather than one-size-fits-all solutions.
For fashion, this presents an opportunity to move beyond symbolic sustainability efforts and commit to long-term procurement agreements that directly support farmers in transitioning to indigenous cotton varieties. In doing so, brands can help reduce financial risk for growers, ensuring that regenerative agriculture is not just an aspirational ideal but a viable, scalable reality.
Aditi Mayer is a journalist and photographer whose work examines inequities within global supply chains — particularly in the fashion industry — while amplifying narratives of resilience, heritage and cultural preservation. She is the founder of storytelling and social impact agency The Artisan Archive, and an investor in the weaving school established by Kheti Virasat Mission’s Trinjan programme.
Sign up to receive the Vogue Business newsletter for the latest luxury news and insights, plus exclusive membership discounts.
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
